PROARTIS Industrial Workshop (July 3rd 2013)

Wed, 2013-07-10

Held in Toulouse and hosted by Airbus, the PROARTIS Industrial Workshop brought 29 partners and interested organisations from across Europe together to learn how new tools, hardware and software architectures will allow faster computer hardware features to be used and analyzed more easily in reliable systems.

The specially designed interactive workshop / presentation format for the day included presentations on:

Attendees were pleased to see that the PROARTIS approach not only supports incremental development on multicore systems, but in fact that the requirements of time composability and the requirements of incremental development are the same: to control and reduce dependencies between different parts of the software that arise from the design of the platform.

Industry attendees were especially keen to hear about the "software-only" project results that allow the mathematical rigour of PROARTIS to be applied to conventional deterministic hardware. The ensuing discussion showed that industry experts are very keen to understand the exact implications of such implementations – number of test-cases, amount of test coverage required and the time taken to complete analysis – and how tight pWCET estimates are (how close to common practice but now with much stronger guarantees). This is one of the areas where we expect that PROARTIS techniques can be more easily disseminated into industry.

Attendees were also curious about how probabilistic guarantees can be attained, and what precise properties are needed from the hardware/software platform to apply Probabilistic Timing Analysis (PTA).

The main request from the industry attendees? They want to get their colleagues on board, so they need concise material available to convince their colleagues that it really works in practice. This is hugely encouraging!

The workshop was part of the final arrangements to conclude this 42-month research project funded by the EU, which formally finishes at the end of July 2013.